Directions EMEA last week was an overall positive affair – an adjusted message from Microsoft combined with the charm of Madrid clearly had an impact. Sure, some important questions regarding future versions Dynamics NAV remains, but this has been covered extensively by others – instead, we would like to share the ‘feel’ of what we left Madrid with.

During our first Directions in Berlin in 2010, our team left with the feeling of not being fully prepared for the future changes – this despite presenting RTC hands-on-labs together with Microsoft. By comparison, at Directions Madrid 2017, the same people felt quite curious about the future – and it is not really because the changes presented are fewer.

Maybe it is just that the frequency has changed from an annual jump to many smaller changes during the year that we are more used to the pace of change. Still, even for a sizable development team like ours, it is hard to keep up with everything, so somewhere along the way, we must have changed our approach.

This is what was discussed in our retrospective analysis on the plane back.

Hit by the challenge that many a growing company face, we decided to move … again! Actually, we decided some time ago – well before we ran out of space, but it took us a while to find the right place, with a nice view and in the right location close to transportation.

The lay-out, kitchen and IT infrastructure we had to put in ourselves, which meant that by the time we moved last week our meeting room was used for office space and we were playing musical chairs for the last work places – luckily, we had some people on business trips.

This time we have doubled the office space for good measure, which should hopefully give us a little time before we do this again! We have also already added extra workstations for people wishing to join our growing team of highly skilled Dynamics experts.

Equally important, now that we have a meeting room again, combined with the extra work-space we can better accommodate our visitors – so, we hope to see you in Kyiv soon.

Last week of June,we continued our commitment to continuous learning for our NAV team – not only did we train our new people on ‘Architecture and design patterns’, but we opened the door to a new world by training much of the team on ‘Extensions 2.0 & new development environment (VS Code)’.

Through www.dynamicappalliance.com we are involved in building apps for D365 Business Edition (including our own), but this is the first time that we feel so well prepared for new Microsoft releases in the autumn. It is not a bad feelin!

A big thank you to Mark Brummel and Luc van Vugt from NAVSkills for making the trip to Kyiv. Always a pleasure being challenged to learn something new.

The new version of Microsoft Dynamics NAV just released in the fall of 2016 offers substantial potential to reduce process costs thanks to full Office 365 integration and embedded PowerBI. In an ever more connected world, an old system out of support does not improve systems integration (including Internet of things) or allows for better business processes – the new NAV version makes this argument easy to make.

Yet, we remain in a situation where more than 70% of NAV installations are out of mainstream support from Microsoft. Customers still think of upgrades as having a root canal and Dynamics partners assign a lower priority to moving existing customers to the latest version than they do to new customer projects.

The challenge for partners is that they have delivered the oldest piece of IT their customers have and they are relatively exposed to losing their business to faster moving competitors. So, normally this would call for a strategic action for partners seeking to protect their business, but many partners are still holding back. We wonder why!

We are delighted to officially announce the launch of our new initiative, DynamicsAppAlliance.

We advise and assist companies that want to develop apps on the new cloud offering Dynamics 365 from Microsoft Dynamics and who want to get to market with a certified solution, quickly and efficiently. We also help transform and design solutions for companies that wish to use the Microsoft Dynamics technology stack to build easy to use, service enhancing Apps/Extensions.

DynamicsAppAlliance combines the skills and strengths of Microsoft Dynamics partners and professionals from Europe and North America – NAV-Skills, Liberty Grove Software and Global Mediator.

Liberty Grove Software are NAV technical experts assisting other NAV partners with developing solutions in their projects and end-users with rescuing failed projects. Support of this kind is more than half the business.

About Global Mediator

Global Mediator is a European based development center that provide the Microsoft Dynamics community with resource scalability, broader technical knowledge, efficiency-boosting tools and lower cost.

You are welcome to start exploring. Discover Dynamics 365 and the opportunities that await. Find out who we are and how we can help you take the next step into the future with apps.

The 3 days of Directions EMEA 2016 are now behind us and we can look back at the biggest Directions ever. In fact, it was record breaking in a number of ways from number of attendees to number of sessions – even to the amount of food and beverages consumed.

But, without getting too technical, what did we actually learn?

NAV 2017 will have many new and interesting features that we will briefly touch below. Dynamics 365 will be an amazing addition to the Dynamics family, we hope – at least we are not ready to think of it as a replacement for anything, yet.

One thing that we did take away was that the integration with Office365 (O365), PowerBI and possibly even CRM continues and is a major motivator in both launches. However, we also felt that many of our partner colleagues left the event with many questions unanswered. Below is our take on what took place.

The multi-tenant option has been available in Dynamics NAV since version 2013R2, and it’s basic purpose is to let you store information about Dynamics NAV application in one application database and your business data in other databases.

The advantage is that you can deploy the same solution across multiple business units or even customers while keeping maintenance centralised. The application database contains the object table and other tables that define the solution, and the data from each customer or tenant stays isolated in separate databases.

It was not until extensions were promoted in version 2016 that multi-tenant environments became a really interesting option. And even if a few partners run environments covering hundreds of companies, it is only recently that we’ve been seeing larger international installations start to implement the solution.

We are often asked why the Ukrainian IT experts we provide are so young – and so good. The reason is, it’s not uncommon in Ukraine for a software engineer to have both complete a Master’s degree and racked up over two years of work experience by age 25. It’s a far cry from the situation in Western Europe, where some governments are struggling to shorten the time it takes for students to graduate.

The secret to Ukraine’s IT success lies in a combination of structural factors and individual initiative.Read more →

“Go digital” and “use standard solutions” are two trends in business development that should be included in your business plan if you want your company to survive.

This might seem a little harsh as an opening statement, and to be fair, your ability to get by on standard solutions alone will depend in part on the complexity of your business. But if you don’t digitise your business – and if you don’t try to do so in the most cost-effective way you can – it will negatively impact your company’s future.

It’s important to remember that the massive attention being paid to digitizing business processes in recent years is only the start of a vertical takeoff. We may think of business processes as company specific, but when you consider how our processes need to tap into fast-growing volumes of data on the internet, it becomes clear that, for many companies, it is high time for a serious rethink. We all need to get used to this kind of connectivity, and we all need to examine our processes to see how we can improve operational efficiency.

The same applies to the solutions that support our processes. Once you’ve restructured your processes to be more future-proof, you should also look at the solutions you use – so you can take advantage of new opportunities and streamline your solutions so they’re easier to maintain and upgrade.

The purpose of this post is to dig a little deeper into these two exhortations and, finally, describe the impact they have on your IT staff and the IT partners you work with.

Every now and then, we check in with our partners and colleagues to get a sense of how quickly – or slowly – companies are moving from older versions of NAV to the latest version. Although the speed seems to be picking up, it hasn’t really improved much. Just last week, for example, a review of 8,000 installations revealed that 70% of the on-premise installations surveyed are no longer on mainstream support, meaning they are still on NAV 2009 or earlier.

Just to put this into perspective, when some of our staff first teamed up with Microsoft to deliver the hands-on labs on Report Design and Transformation in Berlin and San Diego in 2011, we did not imagine that, 5 years later, the community would only have moved a fraction of the install base and would still be dealing with this issue every day. Yet here we are.

Today, just ahead of the release of a new version of NAV in October 2016, even more installations are coming off mainstream support. With every layer of new functionality that Microsoft adds, the steps required to bring these older solutions up-to date become a bit more time-consuming, complex and costly. At the same time, the pressure to accept fixed-scope, fixed-price and fixed-delivery upgrade projects only keeps growing. Can these opposing trends be reconciled?